Thread by @Foone

Here's a CPT Phoenix Jr Terminal on ebay.
And wow, it's... weird!
Check out that portrait CRT, and angled keyboard!

It seems they tried to make the keyboard symmetric for... reasons, but the left numpad isn't a numpad, it's just got a bunch of custom keys, like TASK and PARA and LINE/SKIP/OUT/ADJ.
I imagine that was designed for customizing for the specific terminal task in mind?

Real Monitors Have Curves

looks like the keyboard connects into the monitor.
and I'm guessing from the one adjustment on the monitor, that it's monochrome
(which makes sense. basically all terminals are monochrome: you usually don't need color for text)

It's here.
I'd love to have that keyboard but they want quite a bit for it. Heck, the shipping alone is too much.

ebay.com/itm/Vintage-CP…

Found a video of one in use on youtube:

it sounds from the description there that it's not actually a dumb terminal, just the monitor & keyboard for a business computer that primarily did word processing.

This page (with hilarious HTML errors!) says it was a Z80-based system "probably running CPM"
minotaurz.com/compmuse/museu…

ahh, binary dinosaurs has a page on it!
Apparently the Phoenix Jr is a microcomputer version of the Phoenix, which was a more minicomputer-sized version.
It was a high res B&W wordprocessing system, with graphical support

forgot link:
binarydinosaurs.co.uk/Museum/cpt/

Apparently the monitor and keyboard was reused for the CPT9000 which was a DOS-based machine! Lovely display, there. It looks like it's doing some basic multi-tasking? Interesting!

the Museums Victoria Collections site has some pictures of the system Phoenix Jr on its own.
They date it to 1982.

collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/items/381353

CPT Corporation was a Minneapolis company, making wordprocessing systems from 1971 to the mid-90s.
Apparently their main draw was their "PT" wordprocessing software, originally sold with computers they designed

but they later designed a version which ran on standard IBM PCs, both to allow easy transfer of files in/out of CPT computers, and to allow basic PT-style editing on more common DOS computers

They seem to have been really proud of that monitor! They even produced a version to work on PCs, which had its own graphics card, and needed special drivers for DOS, Windows, and wordprocessors/spreadsheets.

when used on DOS it used a MDA-like font (9x15), but at 80x66 characters instead of the MDA's 80x25.

which is an equivalent of 720x990 pixels, though they're clearly not square.

Anyway, another ebay seller has the keyboard on its own, but it's not much cheaper:
ebay.com/itm/CPT-980234…

The systems are both expensive and rare, it seems.
I saw one quote for the Phoenix & 8000 systems as costing around 15,000$, and I think that was in 1980s dollars.

but having just learned of this thing, I definitely want the keyboard, monitor, and that PC graphics card.
Probably not gonna happen though.
I wonder if the graphics card was ever supported by any games?

it sounds like it wasn't just text, since the high-res graphical presentations were a selling point of the wordprocessor computer, so they'd hopefully keep that for the PC card+monitor. And it had a Windows 3 driver, so it has to have SOME graphics.

I just wanna find out there was a SimCity (classic) version or something that supported that weird orientation & resolution

the Nerdly Pleasures blog calls SimCity the "swiss army knife of video mode support", it supported EVERYTHING.

Like the Hercules 720x348 mode!

which feels like such a typo.
384 is a "rounder" number, since it's 256+128, but NOPE! Hercules used 348.

There was even an SVGA version of SimCity (on one of the CD releases) which just looks wrong. That's too many colors and pixels for SimCity, god damn it.

anyway that article is here, since I forgot to link it:
nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2014/01/simcit…

Also it turns out the person who made that youtube video saw this thread! They're @Cloudscout, and they shared their thread from when they picked up that machine:

https://twitter.com/Cloudscout/status/1160987060829872128

and I forgot to mention the best thing about CPT Corporation:
The name originally stood for Cassette Power Typing